Craig Wijckaans : I’m Craig. I’m from Teesside in the North East of England. I write poetry mostly for myself. I enjoy the freedom of expression it gives me. I have been writing on and off since I was sixteen, though I don’t really consider myself a writer. I’m more an old fashioned ‘song-and-dance’ man.

Sertraline

I am a corpse

The body of a communard

Dressed and placed

At the side of the road

I don’t feel a thing

.

I’m in despair

A state of disrepair

Cast out from the pack

Challenged and beaten

I don’t feel a thing

.

My eyes are broken windows

My mouth a creaking door

Pushed only to speak

When the wind changes

I don’t feel a thing

.

I am the toppled headstones

The cemetery’s shame

Face down

Moss bound

I don’t feel a thing

.

I am the teenage mistake

Revisited but never learned

The anxiety

Self loathing

I don’t feel a thing

.

I’m the carcass found

In the grasslands

Killed and shorn of tusks

In the name of greed

I don’t feel a thing

.

I’m a man in my early thirties

With no place in the world

Hating every waking second

But I take sertraline so

I don’t feel a thing

Amy Louise Wyatt is an A Level Lecturer, poet and artist from Bangor, N.I. She founded the Bangor Poetry Competition and regularly facilitates workshops and exhibitions. Amy has been published in Edify and FourXFour with Lagan Press. She was a finalist in the 2016 National Funeral Services Poetry Competition and a finalist in the 2017 Aspects Festival Poetry Slam.

Mrs Amy Wyatt

A course of pills

She dispensed her words like a course of pills.

Like wise pearls dipped in mercury every morn

I swallowed down my pride with arabica and bile.

Fumigating my ill decisions and yesterday’s malaise,

I removed the sugar coating to taste what was meant

to make us well. Unaware that soon her words would

fragmentise, a seven-slated box divided yet again

in three became her sun-dial mantle clock and watch.

Now I daren’t trust a single word she says. The fiction is

so real it marks us all- I am a character in tales elaborate

and grand and every night she dances woos and laughs

alone in bed- and wakes renewed to do it all again.

Marc Frazier has widely published poetry in journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, The Gay and Lesbian Review (forthcoming), Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He has had memoir from his book WITHOUT published in Gravel, The Good Men Project, decomP,Autre Cobalt Magazine and Evening Street Review and Punctuate (forthcoming). He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry and has been featured on Verse Daily. His book The Way Here and his two chapbooks are available on Amazon as well as his second full-length collection titled Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press) that has garnered numerous favorable reviews. His website is www.marcfrazier.org

Geography Lessons

Tulips, hats like wings,

Wooden shoes, water in between

Everything.

A young country with resources,

I want to rise up

but take each of father’s assaults.

And she is putting out fires

on all fronts.

Dogs with little barrels,

Snowy mountains, chocolate.

I am the spoils of father’s campaign.

My voice silenced, his words

the only language.

He believes in this land:

It is flat and you can get anywhere

On foot. Eventually.

Humidity dripping. Insects. Houses

On stilts. Water filled with danger.

The woman at the little store smiles,

Says I have big, blue eyes.

I do not know this.

Two blocks away, she is another country.

What is Left

Below the Green Mountains, I am more stone than water, my heart a clearing sky.

Remember the cottages of Sea Cliff, wild with wisteria and blue trim, people gathered to

watch sun set over the Sound?

My words choke on weeds of want; they grow along every unnamed road I find—near

Caribbean blue, into Santa Fe orange, Vermont green.

Pretty lies bloom, even in desert.

It is always light somewhere to study the errant heart.

John Malvert was born in E. York. He settled near Withernsea, North Yorkshire and moved to Grimsby and North Lincolnshire in the 60s. He is now retired and lives in Market Rasen. He writes poetry and short stories as a hobby, in no specific genre, though he considers humour is important in balancing a viewpoint. He is an active member of various local writers ‘ groups with work published in local newspapers, magazines, books etc. His latest publication is a poem opening a recent book Aspects of Northern Lincolnshire and a contribution to A Century of Wars published byPimento Poets. He is involved in local schools and he is know among local rural community groups within Lincolnshire. He is currently working on a novel/novella.

Bygone Spring

I am too old for spring,
being young again would be too muchfor me to bear, knowing what I do.
So much youthful energy wasted
in the pursuit of dreams – so much time
spent in appeasing the inner self.

Too many summers have passed, with their continuums, of over-spill days and sleepless nights. So many indulgences spent in countless lost causes, and the lengths once travelled to fulfil them.

I am too old for Autumn. It depresses me with its despondency, its unfulfilled dreams and accomplishments. The lurking spectre motions that they are all still possible, but I know that this is not quite so.

Winter is my forté now. I warm myself within my thoughts knowing that around my feet, spring blossoms grow – flowers of a younger generation,which will bloom in their season, each re-generating spring.

Days

I thought of other days.
Long working days,
with malevolent mornings,
and hemlock afternoons,
that encroached upon the
nocturnal paths of evening.
And I paused – remembering
all the tired midnights.

Then, thinking of today now gone, I casually inserted the comma. The hyphen, the semi-colon, and the exclamation mark. Allocating each to their appropriate place, until theprécis was complete.

But other days crept in. Elusive days, with hodge-podge situations that the mind required no explanation of. Days long gone – when I had watched both butterfly and bee, settle on the same flower-head, each tolerating the other’s right to nectar.

And I sighed, thinking as I did so, of my busy, serious, selfish, world. Of the frenetic days and nights to come. Of inverted commas, brackets, various apostrophes, an asterisk or two – and I wondered about the inevitable full-stop.